Android Karenina

The Himalayan glaciers, China’s trade surplus, Olympic ice hockey: the world is full of pressing subjects that people never consult me about. In fact, until this month, I don’t remember ever having been asked for a professional opinion on anything at all. That all changed though in February 2010, when an explosion of no fewer than four completely unrelated people, including a Barnes & Noble book reviewer, solicited my response to “Android Karenina,” the forthcoming novel co-authored by Leo Tolstoy (author of “War and Peace”) and Ben H. Winters (co-author, with Jane Austen, of “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters”):

As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: The tragic adulterous love affair of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya. These characters live in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automatons, and rudimentary mechanical devices. But when these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art nineteenth-century technology—and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen.

At first I was daunted by the prospect of forming an opinion on this literary event. But eventually, after long, hard thought, I settled on my stance. I decided to be terribly, terribly blasé. The thing is that Tolstoy’s characters already lived in a “world of robotic butlers, clumsy automatons, and rudimentary mechanical devices”:

Oblonsky jokes about the “punctual, bald [German] watchmaker, ‘that the German was wound up for a whole lifetime himself, to wind up watches’” (1:IV).

Anna complains of her husband: “He’s not a man, but a machine, and a spiteful machine when he’s angry” (2:XXIII).

Levin invents a buckwheat-threshing machine and it scorches the buckwheat (1:XXVI).

The telegraph always manages to convey the wrong message. Oblonsky learns of Anna’s arrival by reading a telegram, “guessing at the words, misspelled as they always are in telegrams” (1:II).

Anna’s nightmare, one of the most famous passages in Anna Karenina, clearly anticipates the “steampunk-inspired” atmosphere of “Android Karenina,” incorporating a steam locomotive, a peasant-workman repetitively hammering at some metal, and his sinister French mumbling: “Il faut le battre, le fer, le broyer, le pétrir” (“One must beat the iron, pound it, knead it”). As Nabokov has observed, “what these French words contain is the idea of iron, of something battered and crushed—and this something is [Anna].”

For Anna, the peasant mumbling in French is the most terrifying aspect of the dream. Here, I think we find the cyborg subtext. Why is it scary for a peasant to speak French? In Tolstoy’s Russia, French is spoken only by the upper classes—never by peasants or workers. The French-speaking muzhik is a monster, an uncanny union of the semi-animate and the human. One of the robots who wind the clocks and drive the trains has learned the language of his masters.

Tolstoy didn’t know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half-human status of the Russian peasant classes. In “Anna Karenina,” nineteenth-century life itself is a relentless, relentlessly modern machine, flattening those who oppose it. The human furniture comes to life, echoing the novel’s epigraph: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.”

That’s my opinion, although needless to say it’s not the only one out there. Commenting on “Android Karenina” in the Guardian last month, Jay Parini (“The Last Station”) speculated that Tolstoy would have been “horrified by the notion of changing his work in absurd ways for the purposes of amusement”: “Tolstoy,” Parini clarified, “was not a man with a sense of humour. In fact, he could be rather grim, as the late essays suggest.” This is a daring claim, which involves the late Tolstoy judging a work co-authored by the mid-career Tolstoy (who did a lot of things “for the purposes of amusement”).

I prefer to think that, if confronted by “Android Karenina,” the author of “Anna Karenina” would simply have expressed mild impatience: “But I already wrote that book!”